The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Smartphones are exploding in popularity, as are the number of applications that are available to run on smartphones. Many such applications are helpful to use in connection with other subsystems. As one example, some applications are helpful to use in connection with a radio system of a user's motor vehicle such as a car or truck. Such applications may involve obtaining music, traffic or weather information for playback over the vehicle's radio system. This may be accomplished by using a hardware interconnect apparatus, for example the LIVIO® Connect API interconnect apparatus available from Myine, Inc. of Ferndale, Mich., which creates a wireless communications link between the user's smartphone and the vehicle radio. This is but one example, and it will be appreciated that other implementations could be provided. As another example, a pair of headphones could be the subsystem that wirelessly interfaces with the smartphone. For convenience, the above described implementation of a smartphone being used by a user within a motor vehicle will be used for the remainder of this description to provide a detailed example of how the subject matter of the present disclosure may be implemented.
While the use of a hardware interconnect device and a smartphone within a vehicle can provide a number of useful and convenient application services for the user to use while travelling in the vehicle, if the user needs to exit the vehicle for a few minutes while a particular application is running, this can cause the application to be “paused” or temporarily interrupted. When the user gets back into the vehicle and starts it, the hardware interconnect apparatus re-synchs with the user's smartphone, but the previous application that was running on the user's smartphone will be paused. In this case the user will typically be required to access his/her smartphone and manually restart the application.
As one can appreciate, the need for the user to manually restart a smartphone application that was previously running, each time the user re-enters his/her vehicle after it has been stopped, can be of significant inconvenience to the user. For example, individuals involved in sales or service activities often spend many hours during the course of a day in their vehicles, and must make frequent stops where they leave and then re-enter their vehicles a short time later. Each time they re-enter their vehicle after a stop, typically the default application on his/her smartphone will be stopped or paused (as a result of the vehicle ignition being turned off). The user then needs to access his/her smartphone manually restart the default application. This can be quite an inconvenience, especially if one needs to do it several times a day while travelling in his/her vehicle.